Quotes from Maurice Merleau-Ponty

I function by construction. I am installed on a pyramid of time which has been me...Time is that 'body of the spirit" Valery used to talk about. Time and thought are mutually entangled. In the dark night of thought dwells a glimmering of Being.

The unconscious is not a second consciousness, but a nonthematized lived experience.

The organism is an edifice of compensated instabilities (cf. walk, lose one's balance, catch oneself). Sich bewegen= to organize the instability oneself, and thereby dominate it (the Sich defined without 'consciousness').

The body schema is a power to vary a certain principle without explicit knowledge of this principle...This playing with a principle that's not possessed is consciousness itself. Consciousness is, if you like, synonymous with imperception. Consciousness of a figure is consciousness without knowledge of a background.

I live in the facial expressions of the other, as I feel him living in mine.

There is an equipotentiality in tissue. A tissue gives the possible beyond its actual structure.

We have to conceive of a labyrinth of spontaneous steps which revive one another, sometimes cut across one another, and sometimes confirm one another--but across how many detours and what tides of disorder!--and conceive of the whole undertaking as resting upon itself.

It is impossible to be an anti-Communist and it is not possible to be a Communist.

The photograph keeps open the instants which the onrush of time closes up forthwith; it destroys the overtaking, the overlapping, the metamorphosis of time.

The invisible is a hollow in the visible, a fold in passivity, not pure production.

The The distinction between the real and the oneiric cannot be identical with the simple distinction between consciousness filled by meaning and consciousness given up to its own void. The two modalities impinge upon one another. Our waking relations with objects and others especially have an oneiric character as a matter of principle: others are present to us in the way that dreams are, the way myths are, and this is enough to question the cleavage between the real and the imaginary.

What one too deliberately seeks, he does not find; and he who on the contrary has in his meditative life known how to tap its spontaneous source never lacks for ideas and values.

The perceptual synthesis is a temporal synthesis. Subjectivity, at the level of perception, is nothing other than temporality...In every moment of focusing, my body ties a present, a past, and a future together. It secretes time, or rather it becomes that place in nature where for the first time events, rather than pushing each other into being, project a double horizon of the past and future around the present and acquire a historical orientation.

Originary perception is a non-thetic, pre-objective, and preconscious experience.

Psychoanalysis does not reveal an ego that operates behind my back; it links the unconscious to the conscious. We do not want to take responsibility for the unconscious...The unconscious is not a second consciousness, but a nonthematized lived experience...If it is not thematically known, is not inevitably unknown to us who live it.

The 'unconscious'...is simply the pre-objective, oneiric background of all perception.

Reflection only fully grasps itself if it refers to the pre-reflective fund it presupposes, upon which it draws, and that constitutes for it, like an original past, a past that has never been present.

The possession of a representation or the exercise of a judgment is not coextensive with the life of consciousness. Rather, consciousness is a network of signification intentions which are sometimes clear to themselves and sometimes, on the contrary, lived rather than known.

My life is made up of rhythms that do not have their reason in what I have chosen to be, but rather have their condition in the banal milieu that surrounds me. A margin of almost impersonal existence thus appears around our personal existence, which, so to speak, is taken for granted, and to which I entrust the care of keeping me alive.

There is a preparation for phenomenology in the natural attitude. It is the natural attitude which, by reiterating its own procedures, seesaws in phenpmenology. It is the natural attitude which goes beyond itself in phenomenology--and so it does not go beyond itself. Reciprocally, the transcendental attitude is still and in spite of everything 'natural.

The complete man, the man who does not dream, who can die well because he has lived well, and who can love his life because he envisages his death is, like the myth of the Androgyne, the symbol of what we lack.

What there are, are totalities that 1) are not a fortuitous gathering of parts, 2) are not prior to all causal conditions. The totalities are exactly as perception offers them: imperfect and incomplete or less perfect totalities...Gestalten...The thing is...a hollow plenitude: presence, but absence. Its content is infinite, it is essential to it to present itself through adumbrations, therefore always to be beyond.

The 'associations' of psychoanalysis are in reality 'rays' of time and of the world.

Theology recognizes the contingency of human existence only to derive it from a necessary being, that is, to remove it. Theology makes use of philosophical wonder only for the purpose of motivating an affirmation which ends it. Philosophy, on the other hand, arouses us to what is problematic in our own existence and in that of the world, to such a point that we shall never be cured of searching for a solution.